Köylü Kadın / Peasant Woman

Eren EyüboğluUnknown

Sakıp Sabancı Museum

Eren Eyüboğlu was born as Ernestine Leibovici in Romania in 1912. She began taking painting lessons as a secondary school student and went on to enter the Iassy Academy of Fine Arts. In 1929 she went to Paris, where she studied under Lhote at the Julian Academy for four years. She met Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu in Paris in 1930 and the couple were married in Turkey in 1936. Eren Eyüboğlu and her husband Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu both joined the D Group shortly afterwards and became influential members.

The D Group was founded in 1933 by six friends, five of them painters and one a sculptor (Nurullah Cemal Berk, Zeki Faik İzer, Elif Naci, Cemal Tollu, Abidin Dino and Zühtü Müridoğlu). Subsequently the group was joined by Turgut Zaim, Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, Eren Eyüboğlu, Eşref Üren, Arif Kaptan, Halil Dikmen, Sabri Berkel, Salih Urallı, Hakkı Anlı, Fahrünnisa Zeid, Nusret Suman and Zeki Kocamemi. The group remained active until 1951, representing the generation of young artists of the period and played an influential role in the visual arts. The name D Group was chosen because the letter 'd' is the fourth letter in the Latin alphabet and this was the fourth group of artists to be established in Turkey. Most of the group's members had studied in Paris and were influenced by the artists under whom they worked there. Upon their return home they opposed the impressionist style of the 1914 Generation, instead adopting a cubist, structuralist style, fragmenting the elements of their paintings to create more solid and sharply defined forms. This group argued that the art of a westernizing country had to be 'new'.